The ruby users' group for the internet

Looking Back

The Ruby Hangout has been a lot of fun. I’ve enjoyed talking to
lots of great notable people and learning about all kinds of awesome
projects.

My own life has been getting busier and busier. I’m the CTO of a growing
startup, and my priorities have shifted sufficiently so that staying on
top of a monthly meeting has gotten beyond me. Ultimately I think the
future holds lots of great things for the Ruby Hangout but perhaps not
as a monthly event.

Looking outside

The Ruby Hangout has been a wonderful vehicle to meet interesting people and
share that with you. I’d love to talk to lots more people about Ruby
and where we’re going with it. There are other interesting things
going on out there in the world of development too though.

I started the DC Polyglot Programming Meetup and I’ve been really
excited to learn about new things across the industry. I think
cross-pollination is the only way to get the best ideas all the time,
otherwise you get a serious echo-chamber.

The Ruby Rogues had an interesting talk with Dave Thomas recently.
He said you should always be challenging your own status quo. He
recommended for example to try programming without TDD. I love TDD, but
when I write other languages I don’t use it as much. It led me to wonder
what’s really important—-is the value in writing the tests or is the
value in the confidence in our code that we get out of it? It’s just one
example but it’s interesting, and it’s the kind of thinking I’ve opened
myself to by considering how other people get things done.

The Future

The Ruby Hangout will continue, just more sporadically. Subscribe to
our Google Plus page and you’ll always get alerts when we have a
hangout, or follow us on twitter at @rubyhangout.

And always check out our past hangouts in the sidebar, they’re all lots
of fun!

Jim Gay talked about cleaning up and making your code more understandable through DCI (Data, Contect and Interaction.) Jim discussed delegation, extending classes and gave us one of the best programming quotes we’ve ever heard. ‘Your brain is the first compiler, you should optimize for that.’ Jim also discussed how DCI makes testing, thinking about the project and bringing new people on to the project much much easier.

As children we see the world with a sense of wonder that comes about from a sense of newness with the world. This month Brian Cardarella brought back that sense of wonder and excitement as he spoke to us about Dockyard’s gems, Ember.js and organizing Boston’s upcoming Ruby conference Wicked Good Ruby Conf.

Brian also gave an excellent talk on the history of Ember.js, the benefits of using it and how it is being used. For those considering using it, it was pointed out that Discourse is the current post child for Ember. Brian also provided some excellent resources for learning Ember such as the Ember guides as well as the EmberCasts and Ember101 screencasts for video learning. This only scratches the surface of the talk, everything from forms to json to hateos was discussed with a great quote from Yehuda thrown in there too. It is definitely worth watching.

Next month we have Aaron Patterson who is on both the Ruby and Rails core team and sure to amaze us.

The Picks

Hamlbars – Extensions to HAML to allow the generation of Handlebars templates.

With the heat and humidity we’ve been having here on the East coast you
would think that summer is already here. Don’t despair, think of this
weather as an opportunity to stay inside where it is air conditioned and
participate in some of the upcoming Ruby Hangouts!

Last month we were extremely fortunate to have with us John Athayde,
of The Rails View fame. John gave an exremely useful talk on
organizing the view layer of Rails. Some of the topics he touched on
included dealing with legacy code, things you should avoid doing, the
amazing and awesome power of SASS/SCSS, the usefulness of presenters and
useful ways of organizing and re-using your code through partials.

After his talk John answered numerous audience questions ranging from
things to do when you come on to an ugly project that has 1000 line view
files, the good and bad of twitter bootstrap to what to do when you are
a developer and you don’t have access to a designer. It is definitely
worth watching the whole talk here.

If you weren’t able to join us live, you can watch the full recording on YouTube. Please leave us comments, and feel free to ask Chad or
Evan questions on our G+ Page; we’ll be asking them to follow up
with answers there so we can be sure everyone around the world is
included.

Success!

Chad’s interview went off well, and so did Evan’s presentation. I was
impressed with the hangout’s video quality. I thought the audio quality
was especially good; I never had to ask a speaker to repeat themselves.

Our moderators did a great job pulling in comments from the YouTube
stream, even though the live comments were jumbled up.

I thought the social hangouts afterward went better than expected,
although there weren’t as many as I had hoped for. I think more
organization will help. I do feel strongly they will allow us to create
that face-to-face community we’re going for.

Next Time

YouTube’s live comment stream was a little hard to follow. Next time
we’ll have moderators pulling in questions and comments from Twitter
(hashtag #rubyhangout) and IRC (#rubyhangout on freenode.net).

Most people who wanted to hang out after the presentations ended up
combining into one hangout, which ran out of room. Next time we’ll ask
moderators to create rooms in pairs and have a more coordinated system
for sharing the room links. That way there should be plenty of space,
and nobody should feel lonely. We’ll also create a shortcut link from
this website to more easily access the list of live hangouts.

Jim Gay also suggested that we try having some people start a
social hangout during the broadcast to allow people to join more cleanly
after the presentations. I like this idea too, but it means less
moderators helping us out in the broadcast! ;)

Next Hangout: November 7th

I’m excited for our next hangout! We already have Jeff Casimir
lined up to talk about internationalization. Depending on your feedback,
we could have another interview or another presentation. Rubyconf
is just before this hangout, so I hope to spread the word more there and
perhaps find some more presenters. Anyone I should look for in
particular? Let me know in the comments!

This Is Your Community!

What do you think went well? What do you think needed work? This is your
community, and it takes everyone’s input and ideas to make it a success.
Did you like the interview format? How about more “standard”
presentations? What should we do in the future?

Enabling Technology: Google+ Hangouts On Air

Standard Google+ Hangouts allow up to 10 people to hang out, but
recently Google has added broadcast capabilities via YouTube so any
number of people can watch the hangout live. We plan for the “main”
hangout to have our hosts, presenters, and a few moderators or special
guests. The rest of the community will be engaged through YouTube. Our
moderators will be selecting comments from YouTube live and copying them
into the hangout’s text chat, where hosts or guests can bring them up to
our presenters. Our goal is to make everyone feel like part of the
conversation.

Our First Meetup

Keeping that in mind, our format will be (for the first meetup at
least), an introduction, announcements, two presentations each followed
by questions, and then break-outs into smaller hangouts to bring the
community together.

Building a Real Community

One of the things I love most about my local meetups is the time after
the presentations when I can hang out, drink a beer, and get to know the
other people in my community. We want to have that same feeling at The
Ruby Hangout, so we’re going to have break-out “drink-up” sessions after
the presentations. These G+ Hangouts will be each created by one of the
hosts, presenters, moderators, or special guests who were in the
original broadcast. These will be informal sessions for people to get to
know each other and chat about Ruby or other things of interest to
community members. The organizers will try and keep a list of active
hangouts so people can move around, getting to know as many people as
they like.

We also have started a Google Group, The Ruby Hangout. Forums and
email lists are familiar tools to build community.

Continuing the Conversation

The recording of the hangout will be available on YouTube for anyone to
watch. One of the problems we’re foreseeing is that we’ll be recording
at 7pm Eastern time, which isn’t necessarily convenient for people
around the world. We’re considering ways to continue the conversation
with both our presenters and the community at large, making everyone
feel welcome. Some ideas are collecting comments and forwarding them to
our presenters up to 24 hours after the meetup or simply asking our
presenters to respond to comments on the meetup in our Google+ stream or
Google Group. We could use more ideas around this, what are your
thoughts?

The Future

We’re looking for presenters and great presentations. The core of our
community is sharing knowledge, so if you have anything you’d like to
share, please let us know.

One idea we’ve had is to have short “ruby newbie” intro presentations.
Each would be 5 – 10 minutes and would help introduce ruby and related
technologies to newcomers. Think it’s a good or bad idea? Let us know in
the comments!